It was because of my letters that I happened to stumble upon starting to acquire
some kind of a homemade education.

I became increasingly frustrated at not being able to express what I wanted to convey
in letters that I wrote, especially those to Mr. Elijah Muhammad. In the Street, I had
been the most articulate hustler out there  I had commanded attention when I said
something. But now, trying to write simple English, I not only wasnt articulate, I
wasnt even functional. How would I sound writing in slang, the way I would say it,
something such as "Look, daddy, let me pull your coat about a cat, Elijah
Muhammad"

Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read
something Ive said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade. This
impression is due entirely to my prison studies.

It had really begun back in the Charlestown Prison, when Bimbi first made me feel envy
of his stock of knowledge. Bimbi had always taken charge of any conversation he was in,
and I had tried to emulate him. But every book I picked up had few sentences which
didnt contain anywhere from one to nearly all of the words that might as well have
been in Chinese. When I just skipped those words, of course, I really ended up with little
idea of what the book said. So I had come to the Norfolk Prison Colony still going through
only book-reading motions Pretty soon, I would have quit even these motions, unless I had
received the motivation that I did.

I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary  to study, to
learn some words. I was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to improve my
penmanship. It was sad. I couldnt even write in a straight line. It was both ideas
together that moved me to request a dictionary along with some tablets and pencils from
the Norfolk Prison Colony school.

I spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionarys pages.
Id never realized so many words existed! I didnt know which words I
needed to learn. Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying.

In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed
on that first page, down to the punctuation marks.

I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything Id
written on the tablet. Over and over aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting.

I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words immensely proud to realize that
not only had I written so much at one time, but Id written words that I never knew
were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could remember what many of
these words meant. I reviewed the words whose meanings I didnt remember. Funny
thing, from the dictionary first page right now, that "aardvark" springs to my
mind. The dictionary had a picture of it, a long-tailed, long-eared, burrowing African
mammal, which lives off termites caught by sticking out its tongue as an anteater does for
ants.

I was so fascinated that I went onI copied the dictionarys next page. And
the same experience came when I studied that. With every succeeding page, I also learned
of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a miniature
encyclopedia. Finally the dictionarys A section had filled a whole tablet  and
I went on into the Bs. That was the way I started copying what eventually became the
entire dictionary. It went a lot faster after so much practice helped me to pick up
handwriting speed. Between what I wrote in my tablet, and writing letters, during the rest
of my time in prison I would guess I wrote a million words.

I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time
pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who
has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something:
from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in
the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldnt have gotten me out of books with
a wedge. Between Mr. Muhammads teachings, my correspondence, my visitors 
usually Ella and Reginald  and my reading of books, months passed without my even
thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my
life.

The Norfolk Prison Colonys library was in the school building. A variety of
classes were taught there by instructors who came from such places as Harvard and Boston
universities. The weekly debates between inmate teams were also held in the school
building. You would be astonished to know how worked up convict debaters and audiences
would get over subjects like "Should Babies Be Fed Milk?"

Available on the prison librarys shelves were books on just about every general
subject. Much of the big private collection that Parkhurst had willed to the prison was
still in crates and boxes in the back of the library  thousands of old books. Some
of them looked ancient: covers faded, old-time parchment-looking binding. Parkhurst,
Ive mentioned, seemed to have been principally interested in history and religion.
He had the money and the special interest to have a lot of books that you wouldnt
have in general circulation. Any college library would have been lucky to get that
collection.

As you can imagine, especially in a prison where there was heavy emphasis on
rehabilitation, an inmate was smiled upon if he demonstrated an unusually intense interest
in books. There was a sizable number of well-read inmates, especially the popular
debaters. Some were said by many to be practically walking encyclopedias. They were almost
celebrities. No university would ask any student to devour literature as I did when this
new world opened to me, of being able to read and understand.

When I had progressed to really serious reading, every night at about ten p.m. I would
be outraged with the "lights out." It always seemed to catch me right in the
middle of something engrossing.

Fortunately, right outside my door was a corridor light that cast a glow into my room.
The glow was enough to read by, once my eyes adjusted to it. So when "lights
out" came, I would sit on the floor where I could continue reading in that glow.

At one-hour intervals the night guards paced past every room. Each time I heard the
approaching footsteps, I jumped into bed and feigned sleep. And as soon as the guard
passed, I got back out of bed onto the floor area of that light-glow, where I would read
for another fifty-eight minutes  until the guard approached again. That went on
until three or four every morning. Three or four hours of sleep a night was enough for me.
Often in the years in the streets I had slept less than that.

The teachings of Mr. Muhammad stressed how history had been "whitened" --
when white men had written history books, the black man simply had been left out. Mr.
Muhammad couldnt have said anything that would have struck me much harder. I had
never forgotten how when my class, me and all of those whites, had studied seventh-grade
United States history back in Mason, the history of the Negro had been covered in one
paragraph, and the teacher had gotten a big laugh with his joke, "Negroes feet
are so big that when they walk, they leave a hole in the ground."

This is one reason why Mr. Muhammads teachings spread so swiftly all over the
United States, among all Negroes, whether or not they became followers of Mr.
Muhammad. The teachings ring true  to every Negro. You can hardly show me a black
adult in America  or a white one, for that matter  who knows from the history
books anything like the truth about the black mans role. In my own case, once I
heard of the "glorious history of the black man," I took special pains to hunt
in the library for books that would inform me on details about black history.

I can remember accurately the very first set of books that really impressed me. I have
since bought that set of books and have it at home for my children to read as they grow
up. Its called Wonders of the World. Its full of pictures of
archeological finds, statues that depict, usually, non-European people.

I found books like Will Durants Story of Civilization. I read H. G.
Wells Outline of History. Souls Of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois gave
me a glimpse into the black peoples history before they came to this country. Carter
G. Woodsons Negro History opened my eyes about black empires before the black
slave was brought to the United States, and the early Negro struggles for freedom.

J. A. Rogers three volumes of Sex and Race told about race- mixing before
Christs time; about Aesop being a black man who told fables, about Egypt's Pharaohs,
about the great Coptic Christian Empires; about Ethiopia, the earth's oldest continuous
black civilization, as China is the oldest continuous civilization

I never will forget how shocked I was when I began reading about slaverys total
horror. It made such an impact upon me that it later became one of my favorite subjects
when I became a minister of Mr. Muhammads. The worlds most monstrous crime,
the sin and the blood on the white mans hands, are almost impossible to believe.
Books like the one by Frederick Olmstead opened my eyes to the horrors suffered when the
slave was landed in the United States. The European woman Fannie Kimball, who had married
a Southern white slaveowner, described how human beings were degraded. Of course I read Uncle
Toms Cabin. In fact, I believe thats the only novel I have ever read since
I started serious reading.

I read Herodotus, "the father of History," or, rather, I read about him. And
I read the histories of various nations, which opened my eyes gradually, then wider and
wider, to how whole world's white men had indeed acted like devils, pillaging and raping
and bleeding and draining the whole world's nonwhite people. I remember, for instance,
books such as Will Durants story of Oriental civilization, and Mahatma Gandhis
accounts of the struggle to drive the British out of India.

Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the worlds black,
brown, red, and yellow every variety of the sufferings of exploitation. I saw how since
the sixteenth century, the so-called "Christian trader" white man began to ply
the seas in his lust for Asian and African empires, and plunder, and power. I read, I saw,
how the white man never has gone among the non-white peoples bearing the Cross in the true
manner and spirit of Christs teachings  meek, humble, and Christ-like.

I perceived, as I read, how the collective white man had been actually nothing but a
piratical opportunist who used Faustian machinations to make his own Christianity his
initial wedge in criminal conquests. First, always "religiously," he branded
"heathen" and "pagan" labels upon ancient non-white cultures and
civilizations. The stage thus set, he then turned upon his non-white victims his weapons
of war

Over 115 million African blacks  close to the 1930s population of the
United States  were murdered or enslaved during the slave trade. And I read how when
the slave market was glutted, the cannibalistic white powers of Europe next carved up, as
their colonies, the richest areas of the black continent. And Europes chancelleries
for the next century played a chess game of naked exploitation and power from Cape Horn to
Cairo.

Ten guards and the warden couldnt have torn me out of those books. Not even
Elijah Muhammad could have been more eloquent than those books were in providing
indisputable proof that the collective white man had acted like a devil in virtually every
contact he had with the worlds collective non-white man .

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right
there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today,
the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I
certainly wasnt seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon
its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a
little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was afflicting
the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London,
asking questions. One was, "Whats your alma mater?" I told him,
"Books." You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which Im
not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man .

Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book that I want to read  and
thats a lot of books these days. If I werent out here every day battling the
white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity 
because you can hardly mention anything Im not curious about. I dont think
anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me to
study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I had
attended some college. I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there
are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all
of that. Where else but in a prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to
study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day?

[ ]

Its a crime, the lie that has been told to generations of black men and white men
both. Little innocent black children, born of parents who believed that their race had no
history. Little black children seeing, before they could talk, that their parents
considered themselves inferior. Innocent black children growing up, living out their
lives, dying of old age  and all of their lives ashamed of being black. But the
truth is pouring out of the bag now.

Two other areas of experience which have been extremely formative in my life since
prison were first opened to me in the Norfolk Prison Colony. For one thing, I had my first
experiences in opening the eyes of my brainwashed black brethren to some truths about the
black race. And, the other: when I had read enough to know something, I began to enter the
Prison Colonys weekly debating program  my baptism into public speaking

I began first telling my black brother inmates about the glorious history of the black
man  things they never had dreamed. I told them the horrible slavery-trade truths
that they never knew. I would watch their faces when I told them about that, because the
white man had completely erased the slaves past, a Negro in America can never know
his true family name, or even what tribe he was descended from: the Mandingos, the Wolof,
the Serer, the Fula, the Fanti, the Ashanti, or others. I told them that some slaves
brought from Africa spoke Arabic, and were Islamic in their religion. A lot of these black
convicts still wouldnt believe it unless they could see that a white man had said
it. So, often, I would read to these brothers selected passages from white mens
books. Id explain to them that the real truth was known to some white men, the
scholars; but there had been a conspiracy down through the generations to keep the truth
from black men

You let this caged-up black man start thinking, the same way I did when I first heard
Elijah Muhammads teachings: let him start thinking how, with better breaks when he
was young and ambitious he might have been a lawyer, a doctor, a scientist, anything. You
let this caged-up black man start realizing, as I did, how from the first landing of the
first slave ship, the millions of black men in America have been like sheep in a den of
wolves. Thats why black prisoners become Muslims so fast when Elijah Muhammads
teachings filter into their cages by way of other Muslim convicts. "The white man is
the devil" is a perfect echo of that black convicts lifelong experience.

Ive told how debating was a weekly event there at the Norfolk Prison Colony. My
reading had my mind like steam under pressure. Some way, I had to start telling the white
man about himself to his face. I decided I could do this by putting my name down to
debate.

Standing up and speaking before an audience was a thing that throughout my previous
life never would have crossed my mind. Out there in the streets hustling pushing dope, and
robbing I could have had the dreams from a pound of hashish and Id never have
dreamed anything so wild as that one day I would speak in coliseums and arenas, at the
greatest American universities, and on radio and television programs, not to mention
speaking all over Egypt and Africa and in England.

But I will tell you that, right there, in the prison, debating, speaking to a crowd,
was as exhilarating to me as the discovery of knowledge through reading had been. Standing
up there, the faces looking up at me, things in my head coming out of my mouth, while my
brain searched for the next best thing to follow what I was saying, and if I could sway
them to my side by handling it right, then I had won the debate  once my feet got
wet, I was gone on debating. Whichever side of the selected subject was assigned to me,
Id track down and study everything I could find on it. Id put myself in my
opponents place and decide how Id try to win if I had the other side; and then
Id figure a way to knock down those points. And if there was any way in the world,
Id work into my speech the devilishness of the white man.